Chapter 3

The chamberlain stood to one side as the distinguished looking gentleman bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said from just inside the doorway.

“Come in, Prime Minister, come in!” replied the equally elegant young lady formally as she rose from behind her desk to greet her guest.

The man stepped forward and waited as the doors behind him closed before continuing, “I have the results of the Capacity, Aptitude and Potential tests our children undertook, Ma’am.”

Her Majesty Queen Beatrice the First, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland looked at the Prime Minister and smiled nervously, “Well, don’t keep me waiting George,” she said, “How did they do?”

The Prime Minister had become a friend to the young Queen since they’d started plotting together and without consulting anything he said, “Prince Andrew scored an impressive seven point nine, Ma’am and Princess Elizabeth achieved seven point seven.”

“And how did your Steven fare?” enquired the Queen.

The father couldn’t contain his pride at his son’s achievement and it showed when he replied, “He dropped right into the gap between your children Ma’am, he scored an excellent seven point eight.”

“So all three of the children can volunteer,” said the Queen, her relief obvious to the Prime Minister. He’d been working under the same strain as his Monarch and had shown his own relief by cheering out loud when he’d initially received the results, albeit in private.

“Yes Ma’am, they can,” the widower confirmed his eyes alight with passion.

The Queen looked her First Minister in the eye and asked the question she’d been asking him regularly for the last six weeks, “George, do you still think we are doing the right thing here?” She didn’t really have any doubts but she just wanted the reassurance that she wasn’t doing this for herself.

George Brown was committed to the democratic principles of the country. The principles and practices that had allowed him to become the leader of his party and stay there for several years before winning the last national election and so become the leader of his country. Now he sighed before answering his Monarch. “Ma’am, I haven’t tried to hide my feelings from you concerning this matter and I’m sure you are aware that my feelings haven’t changed significantly in that time,” he declared carefully. “If we, that is, any of us, had been given a say in how the colonies were to be created, how they were to be organised and run in the first place then I’d have been against what you and I are doing now.”

The Prime Minister let his shoulders drop, “I’m still not convinced that what we are trying to do will actually work but, like you and many others, I feel that it is the best that the AIs are going to allow us to get away with. Given that and the circumstances as they are now I believe we have to try.” He blinked before adding, “That we need to ‘get away’ with something is evident from the reports we’ve both seen concerning the colonies on Reck and P’yong and the behaviour of the governors of those blighted colonies. If something more stable isn’t achieved by one means or another we will become our own worst enemies out there in space.”

The Queen, her own fears neatly encapsulated by the older man’s convoluted speech, nodded her understanding.

“Then we continue as we are,” she concluded.

The evacuation of Earth, even the limited one originally planned by the Confederacy, was in a mess.

The loudly expressed concept of extracting a representative proportion of the human population had gone out of the window very early in the Diaspora project. The way the Confederacy had limited selection had effectively removed whole segments of the Earth’s population from the future gene pool. Much of the Middle East had been struck off the extraction list because of the corruption endemic in their way of life, especially amongst the leadership. Those rejects had been joined on the ‘to be ignored list’ by large parts of Africa, the Far East and Latin America because of the supposedly low academic and technological standards inherent in their countries. Many of the more humane leaders, along with the affected Governments, had pointed out to the AIs and the Darjee who’d made the decision that lack of education was one of the things that was easy to remedy but they and their protests had been ignored.

The extraction list and its various sub-lists had become public knowledge, actually published by the Darjee, who still didn’t understand Earth politics, and its release had led to conflicts all over Earth. These conflicts had, in many cases, ignored old rivalries and thereby cemented new alliances against the perceived winners in the race to the stars. Major losers had been places like Taiwan, Israel and Turkey, all of which had effectively ceased to exist as nations.

The army of the People’s Republic had invaded the island of Taiwan when it became clear to anti-Confederacy elements within the hierarchy of the Peoples Republic that they were being bypassed in favour of the capitalistic renegades in Taiwan. Extraction, it was declared, was the ‘Peoples’ right and if one couldn’t go then none should. Many Western groups would take up this mantra at a later date.

At the boundary between Asia and Europe the remnant of the Ottoman Empire that had become Turkey was ripped asunder by a combination of internal pressures created by the rift between the country’s large Muslim population and its military. These pressures were exacerbated by the extensive terrorist attacks by Kurds from the PKK based in Iraq. People in the rest of the world, who had problems of their own, generally ignored this collapse, though Greece did recapture Cyprus in the confusion.